House okays Sh27b loan for new port container terminal

Parliament has approved a Sh27.3 billion loan from Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) for construction of the second phase of the new Mombasa Port container terminal.

Kenya Ports Authority (KPA) Managing Director Catherine Mturi-Wairi Thursday said work on the project will begin in June next year. She spoke during the annual KPA stakeholders’ business forum at a Nairobi hotel.

President Uhuru Kenyatta commissioned the first phase of the mega project two weeks ago and it is now operational. Ms Mturi-Wairi said the new terminal is capable of handling 6,000 Twenty Foot Equivalent Units (TEUs).

“Upon completion of phase two, four ships of up to 100,000 tonnes will be able to be handled by the entire terminal instead of the maximum one ship of not more than 80,000 tonnes that can currently be accommodated at a time,” she explained.

During the briefing, KPA also released the port’s half-year performance results that showed 13.406 million tonnes of cargo were handled in the first-half of this year, compared with 13.218 million tonnes handled during a similar period last year, representing a 1.4 per cent growth.

Container traffic, however, registered a slight drop of 0.6 per cent with 527,523 TEUs being accommodated by the port, compared with 530,608 TEUs that were handled in a similar period last year.

“The drop in container traffic is below the expectations of the global average growth rate of four per cent per annum,” said Ms Mturi-Wairi.

The new MD expressed disappointment at the port’s inability to attract transshipment traffic, which dropped to 260,444 tonnes in the first-half of 2016 against 287,952 tonnes recorded in the corresponding period in 2015.

“We at the port have been making efforts to attract this business (transshipment traffic) in the last few years. However, I regret to report that the performance has been below our expectations,” she said.

Ms Mturi-Wairi confirmed that KPA has since formed a multi-agency platform that has been tasked with looking into ways of revamping transshipment traffic through the Port.

“I am reliably informed that the task force has developed an action plan on the activities to be undertaken to recapture this market niche,” she said.

Transshipment traffic is the handling of goods destined for other ports, like in Kenya’s case, goods destined for other Indian Ocean ports like Mozambique and Eritrea.

Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure Cabinet Secretary James Macharia said the Government is committed to ending bureaucracy at the port.

To this end, he said, clearance procedures that are under different government agencies will now be aligned under the single authority of KPA to avoid time wastage.